“... a relief after the preternatural proportion he has attracted of duds and dunces. She seems to have small impulse to create literature herself. Her points are more correct than telling, and she seldom builds them into an argument. When it is not directly quoting, her book is heavyish going. It is written with surprising barbarism. People decline from ...”

“... 48, went off to America for three and a half years. She had in tow her favourite son Henry, two small daughters, a couple of servants, and a young French artist who was devoted to her, Auguste Hervieu. Mr Trollope was not in attendance. Nor was 12-year-old Anthony. Mrs Trollope’s first destination in America was an Owenite community – Nashoba – in ...”

“... confused and often unhappy. But she’s learned from her mother not to settle for anything small, and she sets out to invent her own life. The instinct that attracts her to glass is sure: she knows ‘that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish ...”

“... Enrico Donati’s small painting White to White features an aggressively encrusted pale rectangle with a second rectangle – black, white and brown – in its top left corner. Dated 1953, fairly early for such deliberately coarse abstraction, the painting landed in the collection of the famously plain-spoken art critic Clement Greenberg ...”

“... patronage which drove the Modernist enterprise, and much of her life was consumed in fretting over small bills. Despite her troubles, she read and wrote to a rigorous schedule, and never touched a drink before 6 p.m. In 1921 she published ‘Speed the Plough’, a short story about a shell-shocked veteran of the Great War, and a minor masterpiece. Her first ...”

“... It’s just that this verdict is passed on The Miracle Worker (1962) of all films. When Helen Keller made her first communication with another human being, it wasn’t a lot like selling out a considered political position. What it was like was a painful birth, and Arthur Penn’s film doesn’t play down the pain of her entering into language. The ...”

“... cannot receive absolution because he refuses to obey Father Rank’s instruction to steer clear of Helen Rolt. If he takes Communion in his state of mortal sin, then he will damn himself, but he goes ahead anyway and receives ‘the pale papery taste of an eternal sentence on the tongue’. Christ soon reproaches him, speaking from the wafer lodged in his ...”

“... with her appointments at the Maudsley. Miller was leaving, and she was treated by a doctor whose small talk about the world heavyweight championship was ‘remote from what I felt to be the centre of concern’. Things improved with the arrival of a new psychiatrist, Dr Cawley. He ‘had been a zoologist and mathematician’, ‘dressed as for a day in the ...”

“... with his poetry, that of Vermeer, and Vermeer’s paintings and interiors! One of the editors, Helen Deese, writes a highly perceptive essay on the relation of Lowell’s poetry to the visual arts, but she seems to take it for granted that the Vermeer analogy invoked, for example, in Lowell’s ‘Epilogue’ is a natural and normal one. It seems to me ...”

“... journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine Whitehorn, Polly Toynbee, Nancy Spain, Helen Gurley Brown. Agony aunts get an even rawer deal: Marje Proops, Anne Landers and Dear Abby are firmly out. Pauline Réage is not given the benefit of the gender doubt. There is a noticeable favouritism towards the French experimental novel but indifference ...”

“... have to sit amidst the silence listening to the snapping of threads.’ Dissidence plays a fairly small part in Klima’s preoccupations, which are more existential, both more private and more universal. The ‘threads’ to which he refers are those of the ‘net’ of relations which he, or his narrator, for ‘none of the characters in this book – and ...”

“... city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary – the absolute power of capitalism.’ This was in essence a heavy-breathing version of the noir fix on Los Angeles which began in 1934 with James M. Cain’s The postman always rings ...”

“... actors are much like ourselves, only better-looking, with faster cars; people like Tom Hanks or Helen Hunt derive the major part of their appeal from what we might call their apparent ordinariness, and only occasionally, as with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, does an actor come along who seems to have the superhuman plasticity of a cartoon. These movie ...”

“... coffin all the way from the Transkei to the Pretoria police mortuary only to find that it was too small for the body to fit in. The inspector on duty saw the problem from a different angle: it was the body rather than the coffin that was causing the problem. He started to cut off the arms from the shoulders of the body, and the legs from the hip. The startled ...”

“... available from the social setting. A child of eleven or twelve was moved from family life in a small hovel to semi-institutional life in the great house of Mellerstain, an experience of new people, a new physical world, new tasks and a new level of discipline: no wonder flight home seemed attractive. Discipline, though, does not seem to have been very ...”